Chapter 1

DELLA

I was dreaming again about running through the dark woods. It was my seventeenth birthday. Sharp pieces of jagged rock and tree branches cut into the heals of my feet as I moved through the trees.

Closing my eyes, I tapped into my wolf senses. The intense smell of pine surrounding me, the gushing water from a nearby waterfall. Birds chirped continuously and that's when I got the smell.

As a predator, it was the most familiar smell in the world. The tangy stench of death hung in the air. It was so strong that I could taste the acidity on my tongue.

My eyes snapped open and my heart started beating fast as my world warped and I was transported to the cabin I stayed in with my parents.

The wind whistled as I walked towards the cabin. The front door was smashed in and barely hanging on its hinges.

I stepped inside the cabin; the floorboards creaked underneath my boots. They were upstairs. I could smell them.

Taking a deep breath, I moved upstairs and soon found myself outside their bedroom. My heart pounded in my throat as I gripped the icy doorknob and pushed it open.

Horror gripped my body and I shut my eyes immediately. But I still saw them. Torn limbs and blood. There was blood everywhere. It was a massacre.

I jerked awake, taking in gulps of air as the nightmare faded away and the dark cave came into view.

"Just a nightmare," I whispered to myself.

Adjusting my eyes to my surroundings, I could hear the birds chirping as weak, grey evening light streamed in at the mouth of the cave. My entire body was sore and exhausted. Living in the wild took a toll on my human body.

Taking a deep breath, I relaxed as my heart began beating at its normal pace. A thin film of perspiration covered my body. It's been almost a year since the night I found my parents and the nightmares had been haunting me ever since it happened.

After my parents were killed, the pack fled to the North, as far as they could to be away from our home and abandoned me. I was still a child in their eyes. A girl that hadn't yet shifted. For some unexplainable reason, my shift wasn't happening anytime soon. I just couldn't feel my wolf. I knew I was different inside, but there was something still holding me back.

What could I possibly know about running a pack anyway? Everyone that I had once trusted had rejected me, so I turned rogue and lived wild. It was the only way to survive in the mountains. You either hunted or became the hunted.

Crawling on my knees, I squeezed through the entrance of the cave as it wasn't that wide of an entrance, but I'd been starving for so long and lost more than a few pounds, that I could fit through the space.

Once I made my way through, I fell right into a mushy pile of leaves and wet mud. An earthy scent of rain still lingered in the air. Pushing myself up on my palms, I stood up and inhaled the cool air.

My stomach rumbled as I began trekking through the woods. I needed some food and clean clothes because the set of clothes I was wearing now had become mucky and a layer of dirt clung to my skin. A bath wouldn't be too bad either.

It didn't take me long to locate the small cabin a little distance away from where I was. I could smell fried bacon and coffee. My stomach rumbled again as I climbed up a small hill and saw the small cabin surrounded by firs. I came here a few times a month, careful not to take too much.

As I neared the cabin I picked up an odd scent.

I knew the cabin belonged to an old couple in their fifties. They were human. This scent, however, did not belong to a human. I could make out that scent anywhere. That's the thing with wolves.

We all have that familiar scent. It's coded in our DNA and this was a wolf's scent. Male to be specific. And clean too. Which meant he wasn't a rogue. I could smell the air thick with his testosterone. It's bad enough on male humans, but when you could smell male werewolf testosterone, that was on a whole different level.

I tapped into my senses and closed my eyes. My change hadn't yet come, but I had basic abilities. Things my father taught me when I was younger.

Closing my eyes helped me locate any threats and it helped me focus on my surroundings.

Birds tweeted. Trees swayed. Miles away, I could hear the snow falling from one of the black, jagged mountain peaks. I inhaled deeply. The scent seemed to be disappearing and I couldn't hear any other sounds. Maybe he left. But what did he want here? Werewolves usually preferred to keep their distance from the humans unless they were rogue and desperate like me.

I'd been careful when it came to other wolves' territories. They would kill me if I was found stealing from one of their camps.

My eyes opened and I walked around the side of the cabin so that I could peer in through one of the windows. The cabin was so small, that there weren't any extended rooms. The bed was against the far left corner of the cabin. A small fire was going in the hearth and food sat on the table. However, no one was inside.

There was something off about the entire situation, but I was hungry and there was no negotiating with my stomach when I was hungry. I moved around to the front door and eased the latch open, before going inside.

If a male werewolf was around this cabin, I needed to get whatever I could as fast as possible and get the hell away from here.

I found the bacon sitting on a platter on the table. It was still warm the second I grabbed a strip and stuffed it into my mouth. It was fried fully and I could still taste the blood which made it tastier. Fatty, crispy goodness flooded my mouth as I grabbed more meat than I could chew and ate until I was licking the grease from my fingers.

A part of me momentarily felt bad about stealing someone else's food. But as I said before, you are the hunter or become the hunted.

I couldn't remember when last I had eaten good food like this. It was probably when my parents were still alive. My mother used to love to cook. Now I was used to wild roots and a fried squirrel or whatever I could steal from someone else's next meal.

Glancing down at the table, I grabbed the large mug of coffee that was still piping hot, but I gulped it down anyway and immediately my insides warmed. For the first time in ages, I felt some satisfaction.

I didn't have any more time to spare, because I certainly didn't want to run into anyone, so I quickly searched the cabin for any clothes that I could find and in a trunk across from the bed, I found a black shift dress and an anorak. It smelled musty like it had been kept away for years, but I didn't really have a choice, so I took the dress along with a pair of old, white tennis shoes that were torn in a few places. Perhaps it belonged to someone the old couple once knew.

I left the cabin and ran south, gripping the clothes to my chest as I breathed in hard. Thankfully there was no other scent around.

It took me a while to find a little lake past a clearing with icy water rushing down big rocks. Water from the mountains was always cold, but I loved the feeling of it.

Peeling off my jeans and t-shirt and then underwear, I got into the lake. Icy water lapped around me as I reached below and retrieved a flat rock to scrub away the dirt from my skin. It's been a year since I'd had a proper hot shower that I can't even remember the feeling, but this was as good as it was going to get. I dipped my head back into the water and ran my cold fingers through the matted strands of my inky red hair. I did this for a few minutes until my hair was free of mud and the strands were all separated from knots and tangles.

When I was done, I got out of the lake and sat on a small patch of grass as weak sunlight invaded the green canopy of firs above. I fingered the delicate necklace around my neck. It was gold with a tiny diamond pendant. The last thing my mother gave me before they were murdered.

Tears pricked at the back of my eyes and I let out a shaky breath. The pack had them buried in unmarked graves and then left without any explanation as to why whatever happened, happened to my parents.

'Probably rogues on the loose', one of the elder members had told me.

It just didn't make any sense to me. My parents were peaceful people.

What infuriated me the most was the fact that no one else wanted to find out why my parents had been targets. Hot anger burned deep inside of me and I knew that I would get my revenge one day, if not now. And when I did, I was going to unleash hell.

Shutting my thoughts off, I stood up and began dressing. The shift dress would have fitted me better if I had extra meat on me, but it was good for now and the anorak was warm. As I pulled on the tennis shoes, I stopped midway when I heard crunching behind me. Careful footsteps crunching the foliage. Before I had the chance to turn around, a warm hand clamped over my mouth and I immediately caught a whiff of his scent. The werewolf.

I struggled as he brought me up against his chest. His hot breath fanned against my neck and his other hand snaked around my neck.

"So you're the one that's been sneaking around, Vixen?" His voice is low and husky. It sent weird vibrations through my body.

He removed his hand, but as he did, my eyes were suddenly blindfolded with a piece of dark material.

"What the hell are you doing?! Let me go!" I screamed as he lifted me into his arms.

"I don't let thieves go," he hissed.

"I'm not a thief!" I pounded my fists against him and kicked the air it seemed because I certainly wasn't kicking him. I kicked again, struggling to get out of his tight grip. "Let me go!"

Something hard came against my head at that moment and there was the sound of a crack as my world seeped with darkness.

"Let me..." my words faded away and then it was complete silence.